September 23, 1999

Girls Soak Up Technology in Schools of Their Own

By KATIE HAFNER

Oakland, Calif. -- One morning soon after the start of the
school year in Teri Putnam's sixth-grade math class at the Julia Morgan
School for Girls here, each student took a
turn at the white board, explaining how she
had arrived at the answer to a tricky problem. Ms. Putnam invited others to chime in,
and nearly all of them did. No one stopped to
raise her hand, and the discussion became a
lively yet well-mannered free-for-all.

Outside the classroom, a dozen or so
rather antiquated computers arrived -- a
donation from a well-wisher. The school is
already well equipped with iMac's, but Katie Topper, the technology director, welcomed the gift. Some of the machines would
be used by girls who needed one at home.
Others would be taken apart by students to
see how a computer works.

The Julia Morgan School, which opened
its doors for the first time earlier this
month, is one of two independent girls'
schools to have started recently in the San
Francisco Bay Area. The other, 30 miles to
the south in Mountain View, in the heart of
Silicon Valley, is the year-old Girls' Middle
School. Both schools have engineering, science, computers and math squarely at the
center of their curriculums.

Such schools, opening at a time when
applications to girls' schools are on the rise,
aspire not only to get girls through adolescence with their self-esteem intact but also
to turn a stereotype on its head -- the notion
that women do not belong in technical fields.

At the same time, other well-established
girls' schools across the nation are beefing
up their science, math and technology curriculums and adding new science buildings
and summer programs. The Dana Hall
School, a girls' middle and high school in
Wellesley, Mass., for instance, has opened
an $8 million science building. The rooms
are geared to a collaborative learning approach, which researchers say is an optimal
way for girls to learn.

Miss Porter's School, a girls' high school
in Farmington, Conn., that requires each
student to take two programming courses,
opened a similar state-of-the-art math, science and technology building two years ago.

Miss Porter's School also offers a summer program in math, science and technology for middle school girls.

The new focus on science and technology
at girls' schools comes at a time when high
school girls are catching up to boys in math
and science. But there remains a serious
gap between the sexes in technology. In
1998, girls made up only 17 percent of the
high school students who took the advanced
placement exam in computer science.

The gap persists through higher education and into the workplace. Women earn 18
percent of the doctorates in computer science in the United States, and only 12 percent of all engineering Ph.D.'s. Women
make up nearly half the nation's work force,
yet they account for just 22 percent of
employed scientists and engineers.

Experts say the problem begins in adolescence. In starting the Girls' Middle School,
Kathleen Bennett, a 54-year-old former
teacher and Silicon Valley technical writer,
wrote a business plan that drew heavily on
well-established research showing that by
sixth grade, girls are in danger of being
swindled out of more than just their self-esteem. As puberty takes hold, girls begin to
lose the self-confidence that once helped
them excel in math and science.

"Lots of them love math and science,"
Ms. Bennett said, "but something happens
to them where they start to pull away."

Teachers collude in this process, education experts say, by failing to call on girls in
class as frequently as they call on boys and
by discouraging girls in other subtle ways.
Ann Clarke, the Julia Morgan School's director and a veteran educator, said she had
seen firsthand the tentativeness with which
adolescent girls approached math when she
had begun looking over the math tests she
had given prospective students. "Across the
top of six of the exams, right next to their
names, the girls had written, 'I'm not good
at math,' " she recalled.

Had boys been in Ms. Putnam's math
class, Ms. Clarke said, the class would have
been more frenetic. "Sometimes the boys
are quicker to want to get to the answer,"
she said. "There's a different energy around
girls. Boys do things more in spurts."

At both Julia Morgan and the Girls' Middle School, the curriculum is carefully balanced with other subjects. Ms. Putnam, the
math teacher at Julia Morgan, doubles as
the flag football teacher. Ms. Topper also
teaches Spanish and soccer. Ms. Clarke
teaches drama. And an entire room is devoted to morning yoga exercises.

Still, there is no mistaking the emphasis
placed on engineering and science at the
Girls' Middle School. The school's math and
science classroom is lined with science posters, offering at-a-glance lessons in things
like surface area and the periodic table.
Each carrel in the computer laboratory is
named for a famous woman. One is Ada
Lovelace, who wrote the programming for
the computer Charles Babbage designed in
the 19th century.

Before math class at the Girls' Middle
School earlier this month, a few of the new
sixth graders, all 11 years old, talked to a
reporter about what it was like to be at a
school where boys have as much impact by
their absence as by their presence.

"Boys at my old school were obnoxious,
and we never had time to learn," said Katie
O'Sullivan, whose plans to organize a National Women's Football League.

Gabrielle Bressack, who wants to be a
computer scientist, said, "We don't have to
worry about being made fun of here."

In a single-sex environment, Ms. Bennett
and other proponents of single-sex education say, girls receive encouragement for
what they do rather than for how they look.
Arlene Hogan, head administrator at the
Archer School, a six-year-old school for girls
in Pacific Palisades, Calif., said: "I'd go to
the mat on the fact that girls in middle
schools in a coed environment are mainly
interested in what the boys think and in not
embarrassing themselves."

Parents seem to agree. Since 1991, after
two decades of decline, the average number
of applications to girls' schools each year
has been 32 percent higher.

And according to a study of 1,200 seniors
in girls' school in 1990 conducted by the
National Coalition of Girls' Schools, 25 percent of the girls surveyed said they intended
to pursue math, science and technology in
college, four times the national average. In
a study of 4,000 graduates of 63 girls'
schools, 62 percent said they had been better
prepared for college math and science than
women from coed schools. The survey was
done last spring by the Goodman Research
Group and was sponsored by the coalition.

"The world's an oyster for these girls,"
said Meg Moulton, executive director of the
coalition. "The sooner you expose them to
the possibility of science and technology, it
can't help but spark and encourage the
possibility of sustained interest."

Still, it's not clear that single-sex education is itself the solution to the so-called
gender gap problem. In 1998, the American
Association of University Women released a
much-debated report that found no overall
evidence that single-sex education was better for girls than coeducation.

"It depends on the school and the student
and the context," said Pamela Haag, a
senior research associate at the university
women's group.

"Our interpretation is that
good education is grounded in basic principles. And once in place, girls can succeed in
a coed environment as well."

Some education experts say that the key
to making girls interested in math, science
and technology lies not so much in single-sex schools as in better teaching methods.

Working under a National Science Foundation grant, Marcia Linn, a professor of
math, science and technology education at
the University of California at Berkeley,
found that making science personally relevant to students contributed to sex equity.

"Both girls and boys complain about the
irrelevance of science and math in their
lives," she said. "The idea is to make it so
that it comes up again and again in your
life." For example, Dr. Linn said, "Have
students use energy-efficient materials to
design a house, using the ideas of heat and
temperature in situations that matter to
them."

"There isn't any highly convincing research to demonstrate that for every student or randomly selected group of students, assigning them to a single-sex setting
will necessarily be beneficial," Dr. Linn
continued. "I'm much more in favor of
making the way we teach in our middle
schools effective for everyone."

Dr. Linn has been asked to advise both the
Julia Morgan School and the Girls' Middle
School on their technology curriculums.

Some successes are undeniable. For several years, Castilleja, a girls' middle and
high school in Palo Alto, Calif., established
in 1907, has sent teams to the robotics
competition at NASA's Ames Research Center. Last year, Castilleja, the only all-girls
entry, took both first and third place. "It's
one thing to be good on campus; it's quite
another to compete among the best," said
Joan Lonergan, the head of the school.

More low-key successes are frequent for
students at the Girls' Middle School. At an
"engineering night" for parents in the last
school year, a parade of sixth graders
showed off the bridges they had constructed, explaining the rudiments of engineering
along the way: load paths, tension and compression, and rotational equilibrium.

"They weren't just explaining science --
they were having a blast doing it," said Dan
Lynch, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is
one of the school's two principal donors. Mr.
Lynch said he intended to send his daughter,
Katherine, who is in fifth grade, to the Girls'
Middle School next year. "The whole thing
showed me how much these students are in
charge of themselves."